The Contributed module Display suite (“DS”) allows you to take control on How do you want to render them using interface. admin has ability to arrange nodes, comment,user data, views etc. provides drag and drop after as we do for managing field section.

If you want to build a drupal custom page and really don't have any drupal technical knowledge or coding skill or, you don’t want to write custom templates, and  for smaller stuff then you can go ahead with this Display Suite module. Is really helpful when it comes to replacing the default view of an entity to user defined view using application interface. It’s straightforward…

13 ways to maximize Drupal performance

Site speed is crucial when you run a site. If a site takes too much time to load, visitors will get frustrated and leave the site to go elsewhere. Slower performing sites don't rank well on search engines.
 
Drupal performance optimization can be a complicated specialization in its own right. It takes too long to investigate performance issues and fix them. However, here are some quick fixes and simple methods to move you into the right direction. 
 
1. Keep the core, contrib module and themes updated
 
It is critical that you are running the most recent Drupal version as updates by and large contain bug fixes and performance improvements. Keep the core, contribs module, and themes with the latest Drupal update.
 
To run updates, navigate to “Reports” → “Available Updates.”
You can then click on “Check manually” to scan for additional updates.
 
     
2. Enable Page Caching  
 
To enable, navigate to “Configuration” → “Development” → “Performance.”
Enable “Cache pages for anonymous users” and also “Cache blocks.” You can then choose a time value for minimum cache lifetime and expiration of cached pages.
Click on “Save configuration.”
 
3. Turn on Block Caching 
 
Enable caching options for all the blocks that will boost the performance.
 
4. Aggregate Javascript and CSS files  
 
Browser doesn’t have to fetch as many files and it reduces the total number of HTTP requests being made. Enhance your frontend performance and download times by aggregating your CSS and Javascript files.
 
To enable, navigate to “Configuration” → “Development” → “Performance.”
Enable “Aggregate and compress CSS files” and “Aggregate Javascript files.”
Click on “Save configuration.”
 
5. Disable unnecessary modules
 
Every module adds to the amount of code that needs to be available for a page load. And it also increases the number of lookups. Wherever possible use a generic module in place of multiple module that does specific functionalities.
 
6. Cache views content
 
The views module is probably one of the most popular modules on Drupal 8 development. If you have it installed you can also enable caching on it.
 
To enable, navigate to “Administration” → “Structure” → “Views.”
Click “Edit” on the view you want to enable caching on.
Expand the “Advanced box.”
Select “Time-based” and click on “Apply (all displays).”
 
7. Disable DB logging 
 
When the Database Logging module is enabled, you're shown with a menu item in the "Logging and alerts" of the site configuration. When the Database Logging module is disabled, although the menu item for Database logging goes away, "Logging and Alerts" becomes empty and stays there. If you visit admin/settings/logging, you're shown with an empty page.
 
8. Reduce 404 Errors
 
Use third party services such as “online Broken Link Checker” or a tool like Screaming Frog and avoid using a module to check for 404s and save your server’s resources.
 
Stay away from expensive 404 errors using Drupal Fast 404 module as it can normally such errors with less than 1MB of memory.
 
9. Fast 404 Responses 
 
When your site has broken images or CSS file paths, it will reduce the page speed significantly The Fast 404 module changes the way 404 errors are handled, delivering fast 404 error messages.
 
10. Compress Images 
 
The loading speed of large image files are slow. Make the file size smaller so they are not larger than they need to be. For image fields, you can use image styles (admin/config/media/image-styles) to resize images to the desired size.
 
11. Use Sprite Sheets
 
An image sprite is an aggregation of a single image. A web page loaded with a number of images is slow to load and generates multiple server requests. Reduce multiple server requests with image sprites and save bandwidth.
 
12. Lazy Loading of Images 
 
Lazy loading images can substantially increase your page load times by ensuring the image will only load when it is visible to the browser window. “Image Lazyloader” is the most popular Drupal module over 18,000 downloads.
 
13. Content Delivery Network
 
Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Drupal is a fast and easy way to instantly see decreased load times for your website. Protect your digital assets such as product images, javascript, CSS across the world will ensure that they are delivered faster to your visitors and reducing latency.
 
This represents a run down of 13 easier ways to boost the performance of Drupal sites. Track the changes to ensure that there is actually an improvement in the performance.
 
Let me know in the comments below if you can think of any more quick wins to improve performance of a Drupal site.
 
 

admin Thu, 06/15/2017 - 10:44 Ramdoss Drupal Modules Drupal Application Development

Drupal’s Paragraphs module is a big part of what makes it easy for our clients to manage their site content. These three tips are how we make the user experience even better.

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A recent prospect responded to my inquiry about the project budget with this:  "We can't release budget information as we need all vendors to bid their best price. If they know the budget they just bid right up to it."  

When you are calling a function or method that has an argument(s), you don’t always know what type (array, object, string etc) of argument to pass to the function. And if you end up passing in the wrong type, you’ll get a less than helpful error.

Lead Developer UK Conference 2017, Day 1

On June 8 and 9, I attended the Lead Developer UK conference for the first time. Its unique format allowed us to learn about leading and motivating teams in the tech industry from experts.

Josef Dabernig Thu, 06/15/2017 - 12:38

The Lead Developer conference was my first non-Drupal conference in quite some time and I’m happy to write that I picked the right one. Not only could I learn and verify a lot of thoughts about leadership but it also gave me a new set of role models to be inspired by.

The outstanding single-track program featured blocks of 3 sessions, most of them around 30 minutes with some shorter ones of around 10 minutes and some longer ones up to 50 minutes. Let me share a few of my personal highlights: 

Patrick Kua – The Constant Life of a Tech Lead kicked off the conference by reminding us about the basics of leadership in tech and that we should focus on values and principles rather than tools or implementation details. People are unique, they differ and we need to find the right approach depending on the situation. It is especially important to help your team as much as possible by providing the necessary context to accomplish their goals, which is often forgotten in my experience.

Constant Life of a Tech Lead from Patrick Kua

Katherine Wu – Ask vs. Guess Culture Communication brought back the idea of how differently people “tick”. Are you a more upfront person that prefers a clear communication style with others, or are you more on the side that expects someone to read between the lines and work based on assumptions? I definitely find myself more on the guess culture side and knowing that this is not how everyone works already helps a lot.  

Anjuan Simmons – Leadership Lessons from the Agile Manifesto gave a very personal track record of how he mastered leadership for himself and his teams. Working with a hero analogy, Anjuan mentioned that as tech leads we get called for the adventure, we get mentored with wisdom and are provided gifts to finally approach the boss level and return to improve the ordinary world. A tech lead guides other people on paths they have already taken. How does Anjuan motivate his team? At any cost, he will try to preserve the dignity of each team member and therefore earn their trust to together iterate and improve.

Erika Carlson – Better: Fearless Feedback for Software Teams provided helpful insights for one of the topics I most struggle with: giving good feedback. Aside from the general feedback categories: positive to encourage and constructive to improve, there’s also a category that is often missed not considered. “Passive feedback” means that you don’t give feedback at all and that also mean something to your peers. Giving the right amount of feedback in time is critical to any healthy relationship. I also liked to find out about 360 feedback and the idea of having a dedicated #thanks slack channel to collectively practice appreciation.

Better - Fearless Feedback for Software Teams from Erika Carlson

Nickolas Means – The Original Skunk Works concluded the first day. It was a detailed look at the history of the aircraft manufacturer that showed what incredible achievements they could make based on Kelly’s 14 Rules. Providing a system to innovate and release quickly (continuous integration & deployments) was critical to the success of this team.

The slides for all of the talks are available and I added the links to them above. On top of the inspiring talks, the conference had some more features I really liked too. Meri Williams was hosting the conference in a well-organized and entertaining way and followed up on a code of conduct issue in a constructive way. The conference also had a live captioning feature of all the talks on a screen, which helped me follow the massive flow of audio information and was even entertaining at times.

At #leaddev conference in London today. All talks are live-captioned by @whitecoatcapxg, which is awesome. pic.twitter.com/KVcDdSsypu

— Mehdi El Gueddari (@MehdiElGueddari) June 8, 2017

Next week, let’s follow up with a summary of day 2 and conclusions for The Lead Developer UK conference.

Tag(s) Drupal Drupal 6 cron Drupal planet Drupal cron-queue Thu, 06/15/2017 - 02:54 / 0 Comments

Drupal cron queue is very useful while running a big cron job. It will split a big cron job into small chunks and execute without getting timed out or being abruptly ended.

Three important things to remember in queue implementations are

1. Create cron queue in hook_cron_queue_info
2. Fill the queue with data
3. Define worker callback function

STEP 1 - Create cron queue in hook_cron_queue_info

Drupal - simplytest.me, Evaluate Drupal Projects Online

How to use simplytest.me, to evaluate drupal projects online?

heykarthikwithu Thursday, 15 June 2017 - 08:50:40 - IST, Asia/Kolkata

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When you're running your non-profit, there is so much to do: basically an unlimited amount of work, right? Board meetings, fund-raising - and then there's the actual world-changing work you signed-up to do!

Our ongoing series of helpful tips (click here to subscribe via e-mail) continues today with some help on how to efficiently manage one of the most common and important aspects of any non-profit: EVENTS.

In this article, we'll talk about how to setup events in Drupal, and at the end, there's a video tutorial showing the process step-by-step.

Read more to see how!

Hi, my name is Jacob Rockowitz and I'm the individual responsible for maintaining the Webform module for Drupal 8. Two weeks ago, I posted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? documenting my journey and experience building and maintaining the the Webform module for Drupal 8. My goal was to document the current state of the Webform module, while simultaneously planning for the project’s future growth and sustainability. One of the steps toward accomplishing this is an idea I put together called "Sponsor a Feature".

"Sponsor a Feature" is a process encouraging organizations to hire Open-source software maintainers and contributors to build features and fix issues that directly impact a company's project. Two key concepts behind "Sponsor a Feature": all work would be open source and the sponsoring organization would pay for tangible and immediate results directly to the working individuals.

I feel that selling "Sponsor a Feature" to the Drupal community is going to be an uphill climb, especially because no one can technically sell Drupal. In other words, no one is used to paying directly for open source work. For now, I am going to tread lightly when talking about "Sponsor a Feature". For example, last week, I wrote about how Crowdfunding does not help grow Drupal's community to explore the different ways people are currently funding open source development. On Twitter, Adam Bergstein‏ (@n3rdstein) and I began a conversation about how an organization might pay a project maintain/developer.
(https://twitter.com/n3rdstein/status/872856666114580482).

Putting together an agreement that pays a developer to deliver...Read More

Pathauto is a module which lets you automate the generation of URL aliases in Drupal. Instead of the URL being "/node/123", you can have "/blog/article/why-use-drupal". The module allows you to define custom patterns which are generated when an entity is created. URL aliases or URL slugs, help with search engine optimization and they're more user-friendly. Drupal core has supported URL aliases for a long time, but they weren't automatically generated. Pathauto helps with automating the process. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create aliases and patterns, and how to bulk generate paths.

What is Elevated Third, Denver Website Agency What is Elevated Third? Tony Dryer Wed, 06/14/2017 - 11:07

Elevated Third’s namesake is rooted in company culture. It comes from the art world and refers to the experience one has when looking at a particularly moving or captivating piece of art. When you have a “get it” moment—that flash of understanding—an elevated third experience is created between the medium and you, the viewer.

At Elevated Third, a Denver website agency focusing on Drupal, we strive to replicate this experience for our clients, our partners, and our employees.

Our Culture 

Our culture and work ethic is based on an idea that the right environment can foster incredible talent. We don’t exclusively hire people who fit a job description, instead we hire people who are smart enough to grow into their own description. We choose employees based on their aptitude to overachieve. Then, we observe. We figure out what said employee is particularly good at and we create a job description around their strengths.

This practice is easier said than done. It requires a scaffolding of actionable core values and exceptional hires who allow their peers to be vulnerable. Because, of course, learning means making mistakes.

Ultimately, it is an environment of support, vulnerability, and observation that allows us to foster talent instead of hire it based on a list of requirements and a resume. The results: employees who feel important, who produce great work, and who are happy to work hard.

On top of all the standard agency perks like snacks and foosball, our new core values are essential to establishing and maintaining our internal culture here at Elevated Third. They are the guidelines for personal success. Following them is the best way to be successful at our Denver website agency. When our employees are successful, the company will prosper. Establishing the core values in late 2016 has had a direct impact on the business success we have seen thus far in 2017.

 

 

Core Values

When we first got together to determine our core values, we knew it was not going to be a simple process. We had to get it right, and we had to take the time to carefully craft each value.  

We started by listing attributes that we believe make our employees successful. Things like accountability, effectiveness, work ethic, engagement, curiosity, positive energy, empathy, confidence, and thoughtfulness to name just a small sampling. For the next few months, we boiled down our list and crafted them into similar groupings. From these groups, the five values that we have now started to make themselves clear. It was a long, sometimes tedious, yet fulfilling experience.

The Elevated Third Core Values:

• Start with empathy. Respect and honesty come first. Care about our clients, our users and each other.
• Lean in and keep moving. Stay engaged, positive and persistent. Bring energy and never quit.
• Make an impact. Seek out and solve the right problems. Be fearless! Fight for the win-win.
• Be a remarkable player. Put the team first. Step up when it’s time, inspire by example.
• Own the outcome. Take responsibility for results. Embrace data celebrate effectiveness and face failures. Never stop improving.

The core values we have put in place guide all the decisions we make within our Denver website agency. They help inform everything from questions in an interview process, project decision making, peer to peer feedback, internal growth strategy, and long-term client relationships. Every single aspect of the business can be applied to the five core values. Since implementing them we are seen our decision-making process become much more focused, both short term and especially long term.

 

 

We’ve made an initiative out of preventing the typical cliched core value design. Figuring out creative ways to implement them into our everyday process has become a necessary challenge. We specifically seek out the traits that the values exemplify in our hiring process. In addition, all new hires see the exact debut presentation our company founders shared during the core values unveiling meeting.

Our core values are meant to stand against the core value bandwagoners, they run through our day-to-day, our hiring, and our attitudes.

Each and every day, we’re seeking the elevated third experience.

GSoC 2017 Examples for Developer #2 Week of Coding Abhishek Lal B Wed, 06/14/2017 - 21:18

Kiev Drupal Camp 2017: The First Impression root Wed, 06/14/2017 - 16:35

I took part in Kiev Drupal Camp 2017 last weekend. It was a good decision to go to the code sprint. I'm sure that the second day of the conference was much better than the first one with formal presentations. My personal thanks to Dmitry Drozdik, Dmytro Danylevskyi and Alexander Schedrov for their help to meet OpenY.

The main issue of the first day was that presentations went in several 4-5 streams in different rooms and I missed a lot of useful information. Fortunately, Conference organizers recorded videos of all presentations.

On this Camp I had presentation: Paragraphs are more powerful than you can expect.

There was not enough time. I tried to provide the extended overview and 3 demonstrations, but overview was very short and demos weren't very attractive. There is the video above.

Also you can download PDF with slides by the link http://abzats.com/kiev17.pdf

Planet Drupal LandingPage Drupal 8

Second week of ml-engine integration to Drupal boaloysius Wed, 06/14/2017 - 09:34

 

Week two of GSoC was great. I am working on Integrating Google ML Engine to Drupal 8. After all the toil during the community bonding period and the first week of GSoC, things got relaxed. I dive deep into coding. The primary task of this week was to add different training jobs functions (section v1.projects.jobs) in the ml-engine API to Drupal. The project is maintained in d.o sandbox. The are seven commits to the project this week. 

The transition from raw PHP code to Drupal code was smooth, but composer update made me frustrated in the beginning. The Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Composer.lock file record the exact library versions that are installed so they can be re-installed. We can move it to different systems and run composer install to get the exact same version of the library. To add a new library we edit the composer.json file and run composer update. The steps are simple but the terminal looked idle for long and it took me around 15 - 20 mins for the initial composer update.

I have made two videos to explain my work.

 

Video 1

 

Video 2 (Continuation) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF0u0YCEgjw&list=PL6j67i2Q9EFXWZZLKsfE3D-OQ8CFmg8Yc&index=2">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF0u0YCEgjw&list=PL6j67i2Q9EFXWZZLKsfE3D-OQ8CFmg8Yc&index=2">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF0u0YCEgjw&list=PL6j67i2Q9EFXWZZLKsfE3D-OQ8CFmg8Yc&index=2

 

 

 

Inspired from the module that integrates Slack to Drupal, I have added a test part to the module. It is intended to play with different functions provided by the API. For every API call, service account credential and the project name are a must. I have created a credential page to accept and validate them. A tampered private key will through a DomainException whereas most of the other errors throw a Google_Service_Exception. Prediction and training job pages are created by combining Drupal forms and Google API. The values submitted are validated in the submitForm method of the FormBase class and passed to the API.

Few more error handling works associated with the Jobs API are yet to go. To improve the user experience we will replace some with list. In the coming week, I will be working on integrating models and versions API to our module. An issue page is just started. Please follow it to know the progress. 

Happy coding

Boby Aloysius Johnson

Attachment GSoCNew.pdf388.96 KB

Tag(s) Drupal 6 Drupal system_settings_form Drupal planet Drupal 6 : system_settings_form Wed, 06/14/2017 - 08:01 / 0 Comments

Drupal has a rich set of API to aid us in implementing custom functionalities with minimal optimized code. One such utility is system_settings_form($form).

Recently in my project, I created a new admin configuration form, in that I had to set the all the field values as system variables. If I had not used system_settings_form(), then the code would have been like this.

Last time, we gathered together DrupalCon Baltimore sessions about Site Building. Before that, we explored the area of Drupal Showcase, Coding and Development, Project Management and Case Studies. And that was not our last stop. This time, we looked at sessions that were presented in the area of Front End. Atomic Design in Drupal 8: Isolating frontend workflow with Pattern Lab! by Anthony Simone from Elevated Third This session reviewed the basic principles of Pattern Lab and atomic design but focused on the practical implementation of Pattern Lab in the next Drupal project.   Back… READ MORE

GSoC 2017 | Week 2: Port Vote Up/Down sudhanshu Wed, 06/14/2017 - 10:18

DrupalCon Dublin seems like it happened yesterday, but it's already 9 months ago.
This blog post is a summary of the Front end track.
Late but, anyway, I want to write it down for two reasons:

1) Express again my gratefulness to the great speakers we had on the front end track. Everyone gave their best and quality of the sessions were high. Yay! Do you know the frontend track was the most attended track in DrupalCon Dublin?

2) Motivate previous and new speakers to submit sessions for the upcoming DrupalCon Vienna (consider also the Horizons track)

As a frontend track chair, I thought that something I could do for the speakers was to immortalise the moment where our brilliant speakers were in the DrupalCon stage.
Here we go:

Improving the Responsive Web Design Process in 2016

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Cristina Chumillas did a great summary of best practices, and I enjoyed her demo how to achieve responsive images with Drupal 8.
Cristina is also the frontend track chair for DrupalCon Vienna and organizes Drupal Summer (29th of June, Barcelona)

Streamlined Front-end Development with Pattern Lab and Twig

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Adam Juran focused on explaining how Forum One are putting together Pattern Lab and Drupal 8, with Twig templates acting as a bridge between both systems. This has even more sense if you have different teams doing design and development, making boundaries clear. In this slide you can see a summary of the proposal.

Structure for Creativity

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description
The session was divided in two parts: Janne Bjørsted, UX designer explained how they structure the work and creative process when building products in their company. Then Mads Thines, frontend developer, went through his workflow / tools and useful coding tips.

Super Collaborative Design Processes for Teams

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Lewis Nyman talked about design process and gave tips and techniques for design workshops. Recommended the book Sprint, by Google Ventures folks.

Closing the Gaps: Prioritizing Accessibility in Custom Themes with Drupal 8

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Erin Marchak gave the 2nd best-rated Frontend session. Full of useful information about a11y, tips, demos and even the deliver of the session was outstanding (she made the effort to explain verbally the animated gifs to reach everyone). A true example of a high standard DrupalCon session.

Drupal 8 theming in depth

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Lauri gave a overview of advanced Twig patterns, and then hit one of the challenges when theming Drupal 8: how to build a component-based design system.
Lauri also introduced the plan of creating a new default theme in Drupal core, that will show / demo better the possibilities of creating beautiful websites with Drupal 8 in other session. This is part of the effort to improve the "out of the box" experience.

Design Principles for Minimum Viable Product

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Junaid Masoodi gave an overview of applying MVP to the design phase

21 things i learned with Twig & Drupal

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Morten Birch gave a condensed session full of tips and things that you might not now about Twig. He announced at the end of the session his new admin theme project, that later was named Eleven

Animate Your Site

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Nikhil and Vidit gave a session introducing animation principles, and then apply them to real world cases. I like how they introduced humor to the session to make it light-weight and more enjoyable.

Creating Layouts and Landing Pages for Drupal 8

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Suzanne Dergacheva explained different approaches to the question every Drupal themer has. What tools to use to build the layout ? Panels, paragraphs, blocks? I appreciate that she explained the concepts with a realistic use case. In my opinion, a excellent example of a session with a good balance of introduction, theory, advanced concepts and demo.

React Front-end For Your Drupal 8 Back-end

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description

Bassam and Aliyah explained how you can integrate React and Drupal, conceptually and also giving details and explaining it with code snippets where the magic happens.

Automated browser testing with Nightwatch.js

Recorded session in Youtube / Session description
Vladimir flew all the way from Australia to explain why you should use Nightwatch.js for e2e testing. I was amazed how easy and painless can be.

Conclusion

I hope this summary gives you an idea of what session we are looking for in the frontend track.
Please, submit your session for Drupalcon Vienna. We care about the content, and that you have some previous experience as a speaker. It helps the track chairs to warranty the quality of sessions are high.
Check also DrupalCon Baltimore sessions for inspiration